Saturday, July 4, 2015

My Porn

If you live in a foreign country for any number of years, you are certain to offend people. And the more distant the culture is from yours, the more frequent your offenses will be. There’s really no getting round this. You can use your own language, their language, or a mix of both, but every couple months, in one context or other, you’ll set someone to muttering curses at you under their breath.

Just today, here in Taipei where I live and teach as an expat, I ran into Daniel, a student I’d taught five years ago when he was a senior in high school. I was waiting for a traffic light, and noticed a young man on the sidewalk a few paces away, staring at me gravely but not moving. I finally recognized it was my ex-student. I said Hi to him, he loosened up a bit, and told me he’d just graduated with a degree in finance. I wished him well on his job hunt, but explained that I had to run as I was late for my class. As I stepped away from him to cross the street, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself, wondering if he still remembered the terrible insult I'd delivered him when he was my student.

Given his initial glare as we waited for the light, I was guessing he did remember.

The insult, as usual, was an accident, actually more his fault than mine.

Back in the days when I taught him, Daniel was known in our school for two things. First, he was obsessed with magic. Rather than prepare for exams or finish homework, he spent free time before class performing magic tricks for the other students (who then likewise couldn’t finish their homework). I’d come into the classroom and Daniel would be at the front, in the middle of some trick.

“Uh, sorry,” he’d say, and sit down.

Second, Daniel was hopelessly smitten by a classmate at his high school, a girl who rejected his love and now and then left him visibly on the verge of tears. When Daniel had no one to watch his magic tricks, he could often be found sitting in a funk, staring at the floor or wringing his hands. None of us at our English institute knew who this mystery girl was; we only knew she was ruining his life.

In short, I knew Daniel as a budding teenage magician whose tricks did nothing to sway the unknown beauty he loved and whose picture he refused to show us.

How then did the insult happen?

One day after class, Daniel came up to me at the front of the room to show me a copy of a copy-shop printed magazine. He opened it to a certain page and pointed at a simple line drawing of a girl in a miniskirt on a park bench, sitting in what was supposed to be a seductive pose. There were some lines in Chinese next to the drawing.

“Teacher, this is my porn,” Daniel announced weirdly, pointing at the page.

I thought the drawing wasn’t very good, and as for porn, it didn’t even count. But Daniel was waiting for my reaction.

“Hm,” I said after looking at it for awhile. “That’s pretty bad porn. I feel sorry for you.”

I remember that his face went red at these words, and he clenched his fist, ready to punch me. But since the students had been raucous during class, and Daniel was something of a performer, I thought he was just joking, so I laughed and walked away.

Ten minutes later, after Daniel left for the night, my colleague Erica was putting away papers next to my desk.

“Poor Daniel,” she said. “He’s really totally in love with that girl. He thinks about nothing else.”

“Nothing else except magic,” I said. “Anyhow, suffering is good for art, so maybe he’ll end up being a great magician.”

“Did he show you his poem?” she asked.

And then it hit me. What Daniel had tried to show me wasn’t the lame line drawing of the girl, but the Chinese lines next to it, which I hadn’t bothered to read, and which were obviously a love poem he’d written. And the book he’d shown me must have been his school’s literary magazine, in which he was declaring to the world his true love for the girl. And when Daniel had said to me “This is my porn,” what he really was trying to say was “This is my poem.” So that, from Daniel’s point of view, our brief exchange had gone like this:

Student is mortally insulted, wants to stand up for himself and his love, wonders if he should punch teacher.

But before he makes up his mind, the teacher laughs in his face in front of the whole class, and walks away.

It was all so sad. I knew I’d have to explain to Daniel what had really happened the next time he came to class. But in fact, that night was the last time he ever came. It was end of semester, and he wasn’t taking summer classes.

Though this particular insult was mostly the fault of Daniel's poor pronunciation, I know for a fact I’ve also offended more than a few people thanks my faulty Chinese pronunciation. Any Westerner who lives here is fated to say at least a handful of outrageous things in public per annum. It comes from the fact that Mandarin is a tonal language, and if you get the intonation a little wrong, if you sing the words a bit off key, the words become entirely different words.

I knew one Canadian who, when he first got here, wanted to get some aspirin for his cold symptoms. He went into a pharmacy.

“Uhh . . . I have a problem,” he said to the woman behind the counter.

“Yes? What is the problem?” she asked.

“Mm . . . Uhh . . . I fuck cats.”

The pharmacist stepped back from the counter, and the other people present all turned to look at him.

What my Canadian friend had meant to say was: “Mm . . . Uhh . . . I have a cold.” But get the tones wrong, and “have a cold” quickly becomes “fuck cats”.

This is only one of thousands of possible slip ups given the slipperiness of tonal languages like Mandarin. I once left a coffee shop with all the counter girls laughing aloud at me. I’d wanted them to help me grind the beans I’d just bought and couldn’t figure out what was so funny. Later I figured it out. What I’d been saying was: “Excuse me. Do you think you could help stroke me?”

Often enough I leave people laughing or frowning, but still, later on, can’t figure out what I’d actually said.

With more Westerners in Taiwan now, the locals have grown used to these mishaps. It makes for good comedy. But still a basic rule applies: If you’re a man who makes it a decade in a country this foreign without getting punched, you’re already doing pretty well.